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RUST by Alec Baldwin In Theatres on May 9, 2025
When the bullet fired, the movie stopped. It didn’t matter that the cameras were still rolling. From that moment in October 2021, Rust—a modest Western about a grandfather and his grandson fleeing the law—ceased to be just a film. It became a crime scene, a courtroom exhibit, a national parable about safety, responsibility, and what happens when pretend violence becomes real. Now, nearly three years after cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on set, Rust finally opens in theatres—less as a cinematic event than a ghost story.
Set in 1880s Kansas, Rust tells a simple but brutal tale: a 13-year-old boy named Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott) accidentally shoots a local rancher and is sentenced to hang. His grandfather, the aging outlaw Harlan Rust (Alec Baldwin), rescues him from jail and together they set out toward Mexico, pursued by a grief-stricken sheriff (Josh Hopkins) and a bounty hunter-preacher (Travis Fimmel) who could have ridden straight out of The Night of the Hunter. That premise is overlaid with genre references worn proudly on its sleeve—from the smoky interiors of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller to silhouette shots evoking John Ford and Peckinpah.
But even the most carefully composed frames—many captured by Hutchins before her death—can’t free the film from its tragic context. The first time a gun clicks in Rust, it’s empty. The second time, someone dies. The crowd at the film’s premiere reportedly gasped, not in surprise at the plot but in uneasy recognition: Rust, inadvertently and unavoidably, mirrors its own catastrophe.
That echo is compounded by Baldwin’s presence. His performance as Rust is uneven—at times tender, often distant, occasionally adrift in accent and tone. Whether due to the film’s fractured production or the unbearable weight he carries into each scene, he seems less like a character than a man trying to disappear behind one. Baldwin helped conceive the story with director Joel Souza, who was also wounded in the 2021 shooting. But despite their personal stakes, the film struggles to cohere.
The supporting cast fares better. Hopkins, as the sheriff grappling with loss and moral fatigue, delivers a performance of quiet dignity. Fimmel’s preacher, too, cuts a striking figure, though his villainy feels lifted wholesale from another, better film. Young McDermott, the emotional center, plays Lucas with impressive restraint—his face registering a boy forced into adulthood far too soon.
Rust looks beautiful, at least. The cinematography—split between Hutchins and her successor Bianca Cline, who declined credit for her work—gives the film its soul. Landscapes are vast and lonesome. Interiors glow with dust and shadow. It is, visually, a real Western.
But there’s no escaping the cost. A woman died to make this movie. No film, no matter how artful or sincere, can justify that. When the final shot fades, Rust remains what it was destined to become: not a great Western, not a bad one, but a solemn document of an industry’s failure, and of a life lost doing what she loved.
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